Category: Clothes

You can “Swap” just about anything instead of buying new. You can swap books, CD’s, DVD’s, electronic books (for Kindles & eBooks) and gently used electronics online. There are lots of different “swapping” sites out there, but one that I like is swap.com. They connect swappers and also let you know of “swapping events” in your area that you may want to take part in. There’s sometimes a minimum charge for participating in the swapping events that they promote, so check the event page for that information when you are deciding if you’d like to attend a swapping event..

Hosting your own “Swapping event” is also really fun and won’t cost you anything if you organize it yourself. I have participated and organized many clothing swaps in my day. The one thing to note about clothing swaps is making sure that you invite multiple people from different size ranges to make sure you have a variety of clothes to swap. A rule of thumb for any swaps you might organize or participate in is make sure that the items you are swapping are gently used, still in good condition, clean (for clothes, make sure they really are clean and don’t have stains or holes), and things like zippers work on pants, coats, jackets, skirts and handbags, etc…

Some people organize the swap to be fair and efficient, especially if there are many people participating, by setting everything out in piles separated by size or category and then let participants walk around and take a once over to see what’s available. Then allow each person to choose one item they like and then allow them to keep choosing one item at a time until everyone has a good amount of items selected. This can be very slow if your group is large.

Another option is to have the rule, that everyone can take the same number of items that they brought with them. I, however, like to have the swap flow more naturally and allow people to choose things they really like. Most clothing swaps aren’t hard to manage, because the clothes need to be tried on and things may be tried on several times before someone decides they love it and want to take it home to add to their closet. Whatever is left over at the end of the swap is normally donated to a local charity like Goodwill or ARC Thrift Stores so that everyone is only taking “new to them” items home. This is a great way to clean out the old and replace with “new to you” without spending a dime!